Orwells recension av Henry Millers ”Tropic of Cancer”

Modern man is rather like a bisected wasp which goes on sucking jam and pretends that the loss of its abdomen does not matter.

Så inleder Orwell sin recension av Tropic of Cancer. (En bok som jag en gång försökte läsa (hittade en förstaupplaga från det beryktade Obelisk Press) men gav upp ganska snart – oläslig för någon med min oraffinerade smak angående skönlitteratur. Dock gillade jag en hel del i The Henry Miller Reader, särskilt ”Max”.) Det är ingen översvallande recension, men boken influerade Orwell kraftigt. Jag minns från CEJL att när Orwell senare recenserar Millers Black Spring så konstaterar han att Tropic of Cancer var en bok som satte djupare spår än han hade förväntat sig vid lästillfället, och Miller blev också föremål för en längre kulturanalys i Orwells essä Inside the Whale där han minnesvärt beskrivs som ”a sort of Whitman among the corpses”.

I recensionen från 1935 skriver Orwell bland annat:

One result of the breakdown of religious belief has been a sloppy idealization of the physical side of life. In a way this is natural enough. For if there is no life beyond the grave, it is obviously harder to face the fact that birth, copulation, etc., are in certain aspects disgusting. In the Christian centuries, of course, a pessimistic view of life was taken more or less for granted. ”Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery,” says the Prayer Book, with the air of stating something obvious. But it is a different matter to admit that life is full of misery when you believe that the grave really finishes you. It is easier to comfort yourself with some kind of of optimistic lie. [. . .] Hence, above all, the monstrous soppification [?] of the sexual theme in most of the ficion of the past hundred years. A book like Tropic of Cancer, which deals with sex by brutally insisting on the facts, swings the pendulum too far, no doubt, but it does swing it in the right direction. Man is not a Yahoo, but he is rather like a Yahoo and needs to be reminded of it from time to time.

A Kind of Compulsion, The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. X (1903–1936), art. 263, s. 404–5.